Entering the ski industry has been a success story for Inghams, a co-op based in Zurich. Photograph: Ryan Creary/All Canada Photos/Corbis

By and large, co-operatives are home-loving enterprises. In a world economy increasingly dominated by a handful of multinationals even the largest co-operative businesses tend to have stayed resolutely focused on their home markets. Britain's giant Co-operative Group, for example, generates almost all its £13.2bn sales from the UK.

There are, however, co-operatives with a taste for overseas adventure. Agricultural co-operatives in particular have considerable experience of managing overseas subsidiaries. The Dutch-based co-operative FrieslandCampina, for example, has dairy farmers as co-op members in Belgium and Germany as well as business operations across the world, from Vietnam to Nigeria and Argentina. It also has three sales offices in the UK. Even the largest New Zealand dairy firm Fonterra, still broadly co-operative in structure, claims to operate in a hundred countries and it too has a small presence in Britain.

The famous Mondragon family of co-operatives, based in the Basque country, has also built a global empire which includes some UK interests. The 113-year old Peterborough machine tools company Newall has been part of Mondragon's Danobat co-operative for the past 10 years and Quality Lifts Products near Salisbury and Meier UK, a plastics manufacturer in the west Midlands, are also subsidiaries of Mondragon co-ops. Mondragon has been criticised in the past for not extending its highly democratic governance structures to its overseas businesses, although the co-op has had a policy since 2003 of trying to work towards more employee participation in these firms. "The setting-up of co-operatives requires members who are used to working within a co-operative culture, and this is a process that takes time," the co-operative says in defence of its approach.

British holidaymakers about to embark on a skiing holiday may also, unknown to them, be helping to boost the turnover of a major co-operative, in this case one based in Zurich. Inghams, with the second largest market share in the British ski holiday business, is indirectly a part of the Migros group, one of Switzerland's best-known high street names. Migros, the largest Swiss retailer, has a range of business interests which in many ways mirrors Britain's Co-operative Group. It runs a chain of supermarkets, budget stores and separately branded specialist shops, has a small banking operation, a travel business, and also operates a number of sports and leisure centres across its home market. According to the latest World Co-operative Monitor, Migros is the seventeenth largest co-op worldwide (three places in the league table above the Co-operative Group). Its executive management team is ultimately answerable to the 'Migros Parliament' of 111 delegates, 100 elected from the 10 regional federated co-operatives.

Although very observant readers will find the Migros connection acknowledged deep in Inghams' website, UK managing director Andy Perrin says that in practice the firm has never chosen to promote its co-operative ownership. "We don't really use the connection in our marketing," he says. "Inghams has always operated as a self-contained British company which happens to have an overseas parent." He admits to pondering, however, whether there could be a potential marketing advantage he has been missing.

A co-operatively minded skier off to the slopes with Inghams this winter would not in fact be eligible to join up as a Migros co-op member – though equally neither would a Migros member in Britain be able to use their membership card to earn divi points in a Co-operative Group store. Cross-border recognition by co-ops of each other's membership is a very long way off. What is likely to come first – and potentially quite soon — is a growth in joint purchasing. British cooperative societies already coordinate their purchasing through the Co-operative Retail Trading Group and the CRTG has been working recently on forming European co-operative buying groups, in conjunction with the federation of consumer co-operatives Euro Coop. Delegates at the National Retail Consumer Conference to be held in Solihull this month will be given an update of progress.

This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. To join the social enterprise network, click here.